Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [320]
The practice of inviting occasional non-football guests into the booth began in the ABC era. Not all the guests were lightweights from showbiz. One fateful night, both John Lennon and a pre-presidential Ronald Reagan were slated to appear. Before the game, when it was time to decide who would interview whom, Frank Gifford remembers Howard Cosell telling him, “I’ll take the Beatle and you take the governor.”
If ABC was chided for occasionally turning the Monday Night Football booth into a watering hole for the glitzerati and an opportunity to promote the network’s shows, as part of its renovation ESPN cranked up the celebrity machine even more. It could get awfully crowded in there.
The New ESPN Booth of 2006 looked as much like a parallel TV talk show as a mere adjunct to football. When it increased the frequency of gratuitous celebrity appearances, ESPN risked appalling purists and die-hard sports fans.
Monday Night Football had become a sports event that transcended sports. Was that good? ESPN’s invited guests tended to be mostly TV “stars,” and ABC sent its whole lineup. Eva Longoria stopped by that season to plug Desperate Housewives, Patrick Dempsey stopped by to plug Grey’s Anatomy, and Matthew Fox stopped by to plug Lost.
Others who made appearances: “actress” and Internet sex-tape star Paris Hilton; producer-director Spike Lee; actors Ashton Kutcher, Jim Belushi, and Ben Stiller; rap star Ludacris; actor and ESPY awards host Samuel L. Jackson; and Arnold Schwarzenegger, former bodybuilder and movie star and, at the time, governor of California.
One unexpected arrival in the booth, though very much part of the sports world, was Tony Kornheiser. Kornheiser was tetchy and opinionated enough to inspire comparisons with the great man Howard Cosell himself, though Kornheiser did not irritate fans to such an extreme that they threw mock bricks at TV screens. Nor, for the record, did Kornheiser wear neckties embroidered with the names of his grandchildren as the softhearted Cosell did.
Joining the Monday Night Football party in 2006, Kornheiser wrote and delivered a series of “essays” dealing with such sports topics as Brett Favre and the “demise of the Oakland Raiders,” and such non-sports topics as the inadequacy of rescue operations following Hurricane Katrina. Some viewers loved him, some didn’t. But then, not everybody was crazy about ESPN’s glitzed-up booth, either.
MIKE TIRICO:
I think every one of us who does football play-by-play dreams of a couple of things: of doing the Super Bowl, and then of being involved in some network’s lead broadcast team. Al had done Monday Night Football for, what, twenty years at that point? Once it was announced that we had the rights and Al was going to be coming over and staying with Monday Night and coming to our place to do it, there wasn’t much thought about it beyond that. It’s certainly one of those unbelievable career jobs that you don’t think will ever be on your radar. So even when we acquired it, knowing Al was there kept it from being “Oh boy, how disappointing.” It was “Oh, that’s great for us that Al will be working at ESPN, because he’s associated with it as much as anyone. He’s as associated with it as Cosell and Gifford were over the years.”
When I heard that he was leaving, I was pretty intrigued. I was doing college football for ESPN and our Thursday and Saturday package of games. I had a lot of exposure to the NFL doing the Monday Night pregame show that we did for about a decade. I thought that with all the moving parts, there was a possibility it might happen. I thought that my work as our lead golf announcer and the big football assignments I had been given—whether Thursday night games, or big bowl games, or significant games with ABC and Bowl Championship Series—plus my NFL experience would make me a good candidate.